post revolutionary retro tech

[anti-authoritarian]

here it is guys, amiga 500. one of the best-selling home computers and the most advanced home computer of its time.

it has preemptive multitasking, back when computers uses cooperative multitasking and it's the only home computer of its time capable of doing multimedia.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The abacus turned out to be pretty good. I remember when it came out and people were like "nah, what are we even going to do with that crazy thing, count ALL the rice grains?" "Counting on your fingers using base-60 is enough for everyone" I scoffed as I ate my water chestnut and soon after that I died of cholera.

But seriously, imagine if the abacus had launched back then like the iPhone did in 2007.

 

[anti-authoritarian]

The abacus turned out to be pretty good. I remember when it came out and people were like "nah, what are we even going to do with that crazy thing, count ALL the rice grains?" I scoffed as I ate my water chestnut and soon after that I died of cholera.

But seriously, imagine if the abacus had launched back then like the iPhone did in 2007.

 

[SNEED.EXE]

France's Minitel was the first successful consumer internet service, trialled in 1980 as an electronic replacement for the phonebook and made available to the entire country in 1982.

Unlike equivalent internet services in other countries, Minitel dial-up terminals were given to telephone subscribers for free. By 1988, there were three million of these terminals in use.
Services included online shopping, booking train or airline tickets, message boards and online video games.
It was probably also the first internet service to host porn, in the form of sex chatlines advertised on posters.

It survived the dawn of the World Wide Web for 15 years, with 10 million monthly connections as of 2009.
Minitel was officially shut down in 2012, but the terminals can still dial up to several hobbyist-run servers.

 

[0WLLC]

Graphing Calculators. Particularly the TI-81. Thanks to these wonderful tools I didn't have to use a slide rule to calculate logs or manually compute the quadratic equation for the billionth time. It saved me countless hours by simply being able to program formulas into ready made functions. (Granted I was using a TI-84 at the time).

 

[Pissmaster]

The IBM Model M keyboard is more or less the granddaddy of modern mechanical keyboards. They were sought after for a very long time, before the current era of RGB mechanicals.

 

[Pee Cola]

Movable type, invented by the Chinese in 1040 and introduced to Europe by Guttenberg around the middle of the 15th Century. That shit was a game-changer for civilization. Prior to the invention of movable type, every single copy of every single book was handwritten.

 

[Susanna]

Concrete was pretty badass. Before concrete, all we had to build with was wood, bricks, and mud. After, we could make sturdy structures in all sorts of shapes, including huge domes. It’s a shame the killer app turned out to be feudalism, we could have had domes in every city on the planet, but instead Europe just built castles and farmed mud.

 

[0WLLC]

The IBM Model M keyboard is more or less the granddaddy of modern mechanical keyboards. They were sought after for a very long time, before the current era of RGB mechanicals.
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Model M clones are making a comeback in retro PC communities. Hell, I'm planning on buying one myself. Super comfy typing.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

Xerox Star, the successor to the Alto, running Smalltalk. GUI, mouse, object oriented programming with message passing, and a live system where you can modify the code while its running. A vision of a possible future for computing. A hopeful and less gay future. But the future refused to change and we got fucking trannies programming in Rust.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Worth pointing out: Xerox Star came out in 1981. Xerox had pioneered what wold become the default PC setup in 1973 with the Xerox Alto. Trully a shame it went nowhere, though the price might have had to do with it (The Alto was a cool 17k at launch, or about 50k USD in 2023 dollars.) The Star was absurdly advanced, unironically looking like a time traveller trying to make a future PC out of 1981 tech. It had shit like a decent GUI, a 1024 by about 800 resolution screen, ethernet port functionality for networking, it even had a option to come with a laser printer.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I miss my old Amiga.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

The Star was absurdly advanced, unironically looking like a time traveller trying to make a future PC out of 1981 tech.

It's embarrassing that those old Xerox computers are still futuristic. Hardware has progressed but software has gone backwards. I can't do shit on my iPad unless Tim Apple allows me to. Linux is praised for being free and open source but it's not a live system I can mess around in and modify as it's running. It's archaic. I shouldn't be stumbling into tech from way before my time and thinking it's some Ghost in the Shell shit.

 

[Cybertonia]

Model M clones are making a comeback in retro PC communities. Hell, I'm planning on buying one myself. Super comfy typing.

I have a bunch of genuine model Ms squirreled away, that I shuttled out the door and into my car while nobody was looking when I got hired to do a surplusing job several years ago. Bunch of blue labels and a couple of the really expensive silver labels that keyboard spergs pay out the nose for. They were all gonna be scrapped. Now it's one of my only investments that's beating inflation right now.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I have a heap of Model Ms too, even 122-key terminal ones. One I used for quite a bit, the 122 is nice for some games to set a lot of hotkeys.

Honestly though? Not my favorite kind of keyboard. I found out late that I like light switches a lot more. Even cheap Kailh Box whites for example have a much more sharp, clean click than the buckling spring, which is rattly and pingy if you don't modify these old keyboards a lot. They're also a lot more pleasant to type on in the right keyboard. I know I probably commit some kind of cardinal sin saying this but it is what it is. I generally have the impression many people into mechanical keyboards actually do not type a lot. (if you read e.g. the mech keyboard subreddit, many people there even admit that they can't touch type) Many of them seem to seek out key switches that have very exaggerated, unique effects and while that can be fun, it just isn't *useful* if you type many hours a day and frankly can even be tiring.

My first keyboard was actually a cherry keyboard, that came with the Amiga 2000. (Early Amiga keyboards were cherry before cost cutting measures) I still have it here somewhere. I don't know if it's a collectors item but it probably is.

The Amiga is only known to most people as some kind of games console but it was so much more than that. Comparatively speaking it was only relevant for a short time but I've not met anyone who lived it that it didn't leave a lifelong impression on. One example I like to give is the scripting language arexx. Basically every program had an API supporting this language, so you could write e.g. a script that would take data out of FinalCalc (spreadsheet program) make a calculation on it and draw you a graph in deluxe paint. This was just unquestionably universally supported by any application that wanted to have any kind of relevance on the Amiga. It's amazing that we still to this day don't have anything like this (no, unix pipes don't even come close and are downright primitive in comparsion, and don't mention dbus) and going from the Amiga to an 486 with DOS/Win3.11 felt like a step back in many, many ways. Compared to the elegance of many of these old systems, a lot of the new stuff feels like a chaotic, fractured nightmare.

 

[Dieter Laser]

France's Minitel was the first successful consumer internet service, trialled in 1980 as an electronic replacement for the phonebook and made available to the entire country .

The USA had a similar system called Teletext that was build into many TVs in the 80s and 90s. It could receive data using unused cable frequencies and it was kind of cool!

 

[skjora]

The Curta mechanical "pocket" calculator. Between the end of WWII when it was designed (during the inventor's incarceration in a concentration camp no less) to the early 70's, this was the smallest portable calculator you could have. You operated it by flipping the levers to set your input, then turning the crank at the top.

 

[Smar Mijou]

A "What If?" scenario that I've always been curious about is how things would have turned out if Commodore had gone all-in on the Amiga line of desktops and proposed laptops instead of spreading themselves out with the CD-32, Amiga, C128/64, and other pie-in-the-sky ventures. They really were ahead of their time as far as multimedia and rendering capabilities go. Alot of early 90's CGI effects in TV and movies were done on Amiga workstations.

Even today, there are a few "exceptional" people keeping the checkered ball dream alive. Hyperion even released an update for legacy AmigaOS 3.X a few days ago. And you can buy a PowerPC based AmigaOne with AmigaOS 4.1 to this day.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

Model M clones are making a comeback in retro PC communities. Hell, I'm planning on buying one myself. Super comfy typing.

I have one from Unicomp, and it feels better than any modern mech board. But then again, I'm biased, because I like loud mech boards.
There is something to consider if you're going to buy from them though - they are using the same old tooling for their classic keyboards, so the build quality can be hit-or-miss. There's nothing wrong with mine, but other people were having problems with their boards, so this is something to keep in mind.
Their New Model M is made with new tooling, so the build quality is consistently good. I wish they made them in beige though.

There's something new from the New Model F guys, too: they are about to start making the keyboard I always wanted - F104. Basically a keyboard with Model M layout and Model F technology (NKRO, chassis made out of metal) underneath. But that price, damn, I better start saving up.